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Monday, 11 July 2011

World leaders are pondering the nation's energy fate without adequately considering the effect that such policies will have on limited water supplies. Energy production is water-intensive.

On World Water Day, a new report draws attention to the link between energy use and water depletion. Traditional and alternative energy technologies are consuming a rising amount of water per unit of energy, putting new demands on increasingly scarce water supplies, according to the policy paper from the World Policy Institute and EBG Capital. The trend has wide-ranging implications for policy, business, security, environment, justice, development, and sustainability.

Now - as new energy policies are emerging - is the window of opportunity to add water to the agenda as nations evaluate their energy options and develop policies to encourage sustainable energy production. Water needs to be part of this debate, the report contends, noting in particular the need to manage the trade-offs between water and energy at the local, national, and cross-border levels. In the United States, generating energy consumes 20% of the water not used by agriculture.

"The competition between water and energy needs represents a critical business, security, and environmental issue, but it has not yet received the attention that it deserves," said Diana Glassman, one of the report's authors. "Energy production consumes significant amounts of water, and vice versa. In a world where water scarcity is a major and growing challenge, water deserves a place on the energy agenda alongside cost, carbon and security considerations."

"THE WATER-ENERGY NEXUS: Adding Water to the Energy Agenda," by Diana Glassman, Michele Wucker, Tanushree Isaacman, and Corinne Champilou, New York: World Policy Institute and EBG Capital, March 2011, provides the context needed to evaluate key water-energy tradeoffs. The paper focuses on consumption -that is, water that is permanently removed from its source- while noting that water quality and withdrawal (water removed then returned to its source) are also important issues. It includes a comprehensive, user-friendly summary of the most credible available data about water consumption per unit of energy produced across a spectrum of traditional and alternative energy technologies. The paper provides a tool for experts and non-experts alike to frame issues, ask the right questions about our energy portfolio, and begin identifying appropriate solutions to our emerging water-energy crisis.

Among the report's findings:

Both emerging petroleum and alternative transportation fuels consume more water than conventional petroleum-based fuels.

Petroleum from the Canadian oil sands extracted via surface mining techniques can consume 20 times more water than conventional oil drilling.

Irrigated first-generation soy- and corn-based biofuels can consume thousands of times more water than traditional oil drilling, primarily through irrigation.

The picture on electricity generation is mixed.

Among conventional power plants, gas-fired plants consume the least amount of water per unit of energy produced. Coal- and oil-fired plants consume roughly twice as much water as gas-fired plants. Nuclear consumes approximately three times as much.

One of the "cleaner" coal technologies, the integrated gasification combined cycle process, reduces a coal plant's water consumption by half, while also reducing carbon emissions and other pollutants. Emerging carbon capture technologies could increase a coal plant's water consumption by 30%-100%.

Wind and solar photovoltaic electricity consume minimal water and are the most water-efficient forms of conventional or alternative electricity production.

The solar thermal form of electricity generation consumes twice as much water as coal and five times as much as gas-fired power plants.

Natural gas produced by hydraulic fracturing is a game-changer that could alter the entire energy mix of transportation fuels and electricity generation. Current data indicate that natural gas produced this way consumes seven times more water than conventional gas extraction but roughly the same amount of water as conventional oil drilling.

The paper also identifies specific areas where information gaps hinder effective decision-making but, conversely, could pull together new alliances to break the logjam around energy policy. These include evaluating the water impact of the full range of emerging technologies; updating and filling information holes regarding hydraulic fracturing and Canadian oil sands among others; and incorporating data about water consumption by various industries.

The World Policy Institute emphasizes to political leaders that they must consider the nexus between energy policy and water consumption. The technologies to reduce carbon emissions are coming to the fore. But some of those ideas require high levels of water, a scarce resource that is required by all energy forms.

Monday, 21 March 2011

Go back to the year 1986 and study all what happened around Chernobyl disaster, a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine).

It is considered the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, and it is the only one classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale.

After the Chernobyl disaster most governments and citizens wanted to stop nuclear power plants, the Germans did it!

An American energy trading company analyzed that the failure at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was linked to human failure and they decided to change their employment policy in recruiting only the best!

In July 22, 2002, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an intriguing article in the New Yorker about ENRON's failure and why the experience of older, experienced employees is more important than the talent of newly hired college graduates!

Onle five years after his articles, the global financial crisis started because the global banks had fired all older, experienced employees before!

To hire only talents and to fire all older, experienced employees, wasn't the solution as well as to continue using nuclear power plants wasn't the solution either!

In New Statesman, Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote in "Beware those Black Swans" about the epistemic arrogance of our talent warriors and said: "My dream is to have a true "epistemocracy"; that is, a society robust against expert errors, forecasting errors and hubris, one that can be resistant to the incompetence of politicians, regulators, economists, central bankers, bank ers, policy wonks and epidemiologists."

Can we rely on our talents?

No!

Can we believe our talents, when they assure us that nuclear power plants are save?

In A Country's Lasting Aftershocks, New York Times OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS SATORU IKEUCHI, GENICHIRO TAKAHASHI and MITSUYOSHI NUMANO explain us the problem we're faced with!

Science's Arrogance

And they introduce the problem as: "The physicist Torahiko Terada wrote in 1934, "The more civilization progresses, the greater the violence of nature's wrath." Nearly 67 years later, his words appear prescient.

Humans have become increasingly arrogant, believing they have conquered nature. We build ever larger, ever more concentrated, ever more uniform structures. Scientists and engineers think that they are responding to the demands of society, but they have forgotten their larger responsibilities to society, emphasizing only the positive aspects of their endeavors."

For the first time in the history of nuclear power plants, human failure cannot be blamed anymore!

It's an act of god that has caused the disaster, a natural catastrophe as an answer to science's arrogance and we have to listen to mother nature and to end the game!

Saturday, 22 January 2011

The European Union has the potential to generate almost all of its energy from renewable sources by 2050, it has been claimed.

According to the AFP news agency, environmental campaign group Greenpeace believes that if nuclear were to lose its priority access to distribution networks, then renewables could play a much larger role in meeting energy needs.

Indeed, it argues that 99.5 per cent of electricity used by the 27-member bloc could come from sources such as solar and wind 40 years from now.

Greenpeace claims that at present, wind farms are often "stopped in peak production periods" to give priority access to nuclear energy and energy from coal-fired power stations.

Reversing this could have a dramatic impact on the EU's energy landscape, the group believes.

The claim comes after the European Wind Energy Association issued a report stating that EU member states were on track to exceed their collective 2020 target for renewable energy generation.

Geothermal could supply at least 20% of European energy demand in 2050, according to the European Geothermal Energy Council (EGEC).

“Things must change if Europe is to reach its energy decarbonisation objective, and that will not be possible without a substantial contribution from geothermal energy,” says EGEC President Dr Burkhard Sanner.

“Providing a renewable base load, geothermal energy does not have external costs such as storage, grid infrastructure or waste management. Conventional geothermal power is already a most competitive energy source, but only possible in certain regions.

“EGS, a breakthrough technology successfully demonstrate, will allow a geothermal development anywhere in Europe. EGS (short for ‘Enhanced Geothermal Systems’) will become competitive within a few more years.

“Geothermal will be a key player in an optimal energy mix,” Sanner concludes.

EGEC calls on national governments and European institutions to:

Invest in R&D to deploy EGS and bring down the cost of EGS plants;

Adopt a feed-in tariff suitable for EGS development; and

Create a European Risk Insurance Scheme to mitigate the geological risk.

Tuesday, 18 January 2011

A huge influx of international greenhouse gas emission offsets looms over the carbon markets, but traders and banks don't know yet what to make of the situation.

Participants in Europe's Emissions Trading System (ETS), the main market for the credits, are normally used to worrying about an oversupply of government-allocated emissions allowances sinking carbon prices. Many of them are now wondering if they're now facing an oversupply of offsets having a similar effect.

Procedural reforms and new hires at the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), an agency established by the Kyoto Protocol and headquartered in Bonn, Germany, have led to record issuances of offset credits from that office since December. As a result, credits are getting approved and flying out the door faster than ever before.

Some experts worry that the incoming rush of new offsets could depress the total value of carbon trading globally this year.

"If it continues accelerating like it has since the end of November, it will, because obviously, this is not what is priced in today," said investment analyst Emmanuel Fages at Orbeo, the carbon market arm of Société Générale. "What was priced in even some weeks ago was very regular, average issuance level."

But Fages and others also caution that the influx could be a temporary phenomenon not likely to last for the entire year. Indeed, most carbon market experts expect supplies of the CDM's Certified Emission Reduction (CER) credits to become much tighter into 2012, because uncertainty of whether the CDM will even exist after that year is causing the number of new projects to shrink fast.

"Our predictions for the issuance volumes are very high in the third week, but going into week four or five, that goes down significantly," said carbon market expert Milo Sjardin at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. "In the longer term, we're still having the problem that the issuance volumes in general are not as high as they could be."

For the moment, more feast than famine

Last week, the office that runs the CDM hit a milestone when it announced that the program had hit 500 million CERs allocated to offset project developers since the system began. About 60 million more credits are pending, and up to half of these are expected to be delivered this month.

The end of 2010 saw monthly CER issuance hitting new record highs, and January is on track to again break the record, with up to 47 million CERs possibly heading to the offset projects that are requesting them.

CERs can be sold to governments seeking to meet their Kyoto Protocol emission reduction targets or to firms facing compliance rules under the European Union's ETS. For years, supply into the carbon markets was predictably slow, as project approval and CER issuance had difficulty navigating the CDM's cumbersome bureaucracy, but reforms to the system and more manpower are speeding things up much faster than analysts had earlier predicted.

CDM officials express confidence that the new quicker pace is now permanent, and not a temporary rush to clear up a backlog of work at the end of the year as some observers theorize.

"We'll be keeping a close eye on the number of submissions and will be working to reduce the wait times to 15 days," CDM spokesman David Abbass said. "As a result of the concerted push in December, which made use of outside experts, the secretariat now has a pool of contractors that it can draw on to help deal with peaks."

Point Carbon expects 253 million more CERs will be issued in total this year, more than half the amount of all CERs put out since 2006 and about 90 percent above the volume issued in 2010, 132 million.

Fages and his team at Orbeo only expect issuance to be about 30 percent higher this year, rising to 170 million CERs by the end of 2011. But they admit that they may have to revise this figure upward if the current trend continues.

From a high of about €14 per metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent pollution reductions, CER prices are now running in the €11 range, and some market analysts are warning that they could dip lower. Thus far, the dip has not affected prices for E.U. allowances (EUAs) traded under the continent's ETS, but that could change should the downward momentum continue.

Newly approved HFC-23 projects add to offset influx

The spike in CER levels is attributable not only to the end-of-year push that Abbass described, but also to the release of credits requested by hydrofluorocarbon-23 (HFC-23) destruction projects that were earlier held up while the CDM Executive Board investigated accusations of fraud. HFC-23 is a potent greenhouse gas caused by manufacturing refrigerant gases in the developing world.

A large quantity of CERs were also recently issued to projects that destroy the greenhouse gas nitrogen oxide (N2O) recently, further inflating the numbers. Together, HFC-23 and N2O destruction have historically accounted for around 75 percent of all new CER supply entering the markets.

Though some argue that the picture will return to normal once these three factors are accounted for, available data suggest that CER supply could continue to rise even without the help of HFC-23 and N20.

For instance, numbers available on the CDM's website shows that the majority of new CERs are being issued to renewable energy projects, mainly large wind and hydroelectric operations in China. Of the more than 4 million credits issued on Wednesday last week, none went to large industrial gas projects.

Analysts at the investment bank Barclays Capital in London see a trend here. They predict that industrial gas destruction's share of the CDM will continue to slide, from about 75 percent today to 68 percent by the end of the year, and moving further lower after then.

CER issuance volumes will continue to stay high for some time, they predict.

Longer-term trade prospects remain 'strong'

"We do expect that heavy CER issuance in the coming weeks and we have seen some pressure on prices," said Barclays Capital analyst Trevor Sikorski in an e-mail. "Generally the supply of CERs will help moderate price gains across 2011 and this was reflected in our recent revision downwards of our price forecasts."

But despite the inundation, most experts don't see carbon prices falling through the floor this year.

Sikorski and his research team see plenty of support to hold CER prices at an €11 to €12 per ton range. Compliance purchases by companies in Europe will help firms hedge their supplies in anticipation of future shortages, and new trading in New Zealand should keep the market buoyant, he said.

And the sudden explosion of new offsets supply shouldn't be a drag on EUA prices, either, experts say.

"The European market has a lot of other fundamental drivers that impact the carbon price there," said Sjardin at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. "And if you look at the longer term, longer-term, the prospects are still strong."

One analyst with a major Wall Street bank, speaking on background, even argued that the faster tempo at the CDM will actually hurt the system in the longer term. The European Union's plans to ban HFC-23 and some N20-derived CERs from its system beginning in 2013 could cause some players to raise concerns about the quality of other offset projects.

The analyst worries in particular about the large hydroelectric projects being awarded CERs. A seeming push to please developing nation governments and project developers may lead some to turn away from CERs if they conclude that the CDM has given up on assuring "additionality," the industry term for verifying that a carbon abatement project would not have existed were it not for the offsets trading system.

Abbass at the CDM headquarters in Bonn says the Executive Board is well aware of this perception problem and is carefully managing it. Reforms at the CDM have been carefully tailored "to the need for changes to the way requests for registration and issuance are assessed, to make the process quicker without compromising environmental integrity," he said.

But Fages at Société Générale also expressed concern that the CDM has seem to have undergone a fundamental change in culture -- from one focused on stringency and quality assurance toward a heavier emphasis on getting projects approved quickly and feeding as many CERs into the system as possible.

"Why I'm surprised is that now they're shifting to accelerated issuances, as if they have changed their stance more than they're staff," said Fages.

"I'm a bit hesitant to change my [CER supply] forecast just now because I'm not completely sure yet that they have changed their attitude," he added. "But if they are considering the projects differently from now on, then yes, I will have to increase my supply forecast."

Executives of ECOtality Inc. believed in 2009 that their battery charging technology would be a winner when plug-in electric vehicles began to hit the market this year. But with debts running far ahead of revenue, the San Francisco firm needed immediate financial support to stay in the game.

The help came from China, through a $2 million investment that year by a Chinese company. In return, the Chinese company received the rights to make and sell ECOtality's chargers in its country and in other Asian markets. The relationship is one example of the complex linkage between American clean energy technology and Chinese capital and markets that will be a subject in this week's U.S.-China summit in Washington led by President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao.

¶The relationship is contentious and collaborative at the same time, commented Georgetown University's Joanna Lewis, writing in the latest assessment of China's environmental activities for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

¶The United States contends China is illegally subsidizing its wind power equipment manufacturers, effectively locking U.S. and other foreign suppliers out of key parts of its booming market. The Obama administration has taken the dispute to the World Trade Organization for adjudication. U.S. officials and American commentators noted progress, however, on the dispute over wind turbine technology during the December meeting of the Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade.

¶A key emphasis at this week's meetings will be on clean energy collaboration, says David Sandalow, assistant secretary of Energy for policy and international affairs. "The United States and China are the two biggest energy producers and consumers in the world. We have many shared interests in finding climate solutions," he said.

¶Robert Kapp, former president of the U.S.-China Business Council, said he assumes that U.S. companies have saved up announcements of new clean energy projects for this week.

¶At the government level, in the past year, the two nations have been implementing a $150 million joint program of Cooperative Energy Research Centers, which includes research on carbon capture and storage at West Virginia University, on electric vehicles at the University of Michigan, and on building efficiency at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This program will get another push forward this week, Sandalow said.

¶"We are focused on protecting U.S. interests, but in the course of that, there are ways we can learn from each other," he said.

¶But, she added, "Despite the long list of official bilateral agreements signed between the United States and China in the area of clean energy and climate change, there have been many challenges to following through on the successful implementation of agreed upon activities," beginning with inconsistent funding. "Cooperation is also hampered by the increasingly competitive relationship between the United States and China in the global economic marketplace," Lewis said in the recently published Issue 11 of the Wilson Center's China Environment Series.

¶"Clearly there is a long way to go to build the trust that will be crucial to scaling up clean energy cooperation between the United States and China that the world needs," she said.

¶As the fastest-growing market for wind and nuclear power and the leader in solar power modules, and with a commitment to expand electric vehicles and carbon capture from coal plants, China is the place to be for American clean energy companies with global aspirations.

¶"Certainly we should find something in between to make it win-win," said Zou Ji, China country director for the World Resources Institute in Beijing. "Some people believe now Chinese [clean] technology has been advanced, but that depends.

¶"In manufacturing, China has made great progress, but for R&D and design, China is still very weak." The United States and China can collaborate on joint research and development and scale the technology up in China, where costs are lower, he said.

¶But if access to China is tied to a drain of leading-edge U.S. technology, the hopes for future American leadership in clean energy development -- a top priority for Energy Secretary Steven Chu -- could be erased.

"China is America's fastest-growing export market but it still maintains significant barriers to U.S. goods and services," said Nina Hachigian in an overview of U.S.-China issues on the Center for American Progress' website.

While the trade frictions between the two countries over clean energy are improving, in Kapp's view, serious issues remain, he said.

"In many commercial negotiations, the Chinese play a very hard game of trying to trade market access for technology, and American companies are always faced with the question of how much they're willing to part with, in terms of crown jewels or other advanced technologies ... in return for opportunities to make money in China," Kapp said. "The Chinese are not saints, and they play ... a very tough game," he told reporters last week.

A report last year by a U.S. National Research Council panel criticized China's recent anti-monopoly law that prohibits "abuses" of intellectual property rights by foreign multinationals in China, an element of the country's "indigenous innovation" strategy.

The policy pressures foreign companies to transfer their technologies in return for market access to state-directed markets, the report said. "China is also likely to use the standards-setting process to compel multinationals to transfer the technology that is implicated in the standards or face the legal consequences of noncompliance," the report added.

"While still clouded with suspicions and disrupted by setbacks, the broader trends in the U.S.-China relationship today are fundamentally positive," concluded the report by the council team, led by C.D. "Dan" Mote Jr., former president of the University of Maryland, and John Gannon, an executive with BAE Systems Information Technology and former chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

The challenge -- and solution -- to the issue of technology transfer lies with the protection of intellectual property, Kapp said. "And on that," he said, "the jury is still out."

Case studies suggest caution

Every U.S.-Chinese clean technology venture seems to have its own story and unique issues. For example, First Solar, the leading U.S. solar power company, made headlines in September 2009 with its agreement with Chinese officials to build a 2,000-megawatt photovoltaic energy project in Inner Mongolia.

More than a year later, the project has not gotten off the ground. Under pressure from Chinese energy companies, Chinese officials have not yet approved a feed-in-tariff that would subsidize the cost of the solar farm's electricity.

"Until that happens, it is not economical to make the commitments and take the risks of undertaking a project like this," said First Solar spokesman Alan Bernheimer.

When the project was announced, a local Chinese official expressed the hope of having a local factory make the First Energy solar cells, which are based on an advanced -- and closely guarded -- technology employing thin films of cadmium telluride as the photovoltaic material.

"No question the Chinese would love to have us site manufacturing facilities there, to work with our technology and gain experience using it," Bernheimer said.

"There has been no commitment to putting manufacturing facilities in China," said Bernheimer. "We've only discussed the construction ... of solar generation plants. We've left open whether that could eventually involve manufacturing ... it's an open question."

First Solar's research and testing occur at its factory in Ohio. The solar cells for the Mongolian project would most likely to produced at First Solar factories in Malaysia or Vietnam, he added, but that would not entail technology transfer to those countries. "We have not done that to date with anybody. Our manufacturing processes are the crown jewels of our technological advantage."

Protecting the 'crown jewels'

ECOtality also has traced a careful line in its relationship with its Chinese partner, according to company officials and its public statements.

The company had invested in research on hydrogen-power vehicles during the George W. Bush administration, and when that initiative was cut short by the Obama administration, ECOtality turned its efforts toward electric vehicle charging, where it has a base in equipment it produces for airline use.

The $2 million investment by Shenzhen Goch Investment Ltd. came at a crucial time. A month after it was announced in July 2009, ECOtality won a $99.8 million stimulus grant from the Energy Department -- later raised to $114 million -- to supply 15,000 of its Blink chargers for the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt plug-in vehicles that form the vanguard of the U.S. electric vehicle industry.

The company got a validating $10 million investment this month from ABB, the Swiss energy technology giant, and will use ABB electronics in its charger products.

The chargers for the DOE project will be made in the United States by a leading auto parts supplier, said ECOtality Vice President Chip Read. "We're spending a lot of money to get manufacturing up to speed in the U.S. That's not something we want to abandon."

But ECOtality sees its chargers as contenders in a worldwide market that is just beginning to take shape. Shenzhen Goch Investment is the majority partner in two joint ventures to build and market the chargers in China, and to export them to Asian markets. ECOtality has the minority position in the venture, which includes technology transfer under license agreements that the U.S. company controls, Read said.

Read said that ECOtality's strongest intellectual property position -- its crown jewels -- lies not in manufacturing, but in the back-end software and electronics that will control the customer charging operations, vehicle interfaces, billing and possibly linkages to the grid. These are likely to vary to some degree country by country, he said.

"We have to take into account that we have a high-quality product, not just low-cost one. That will play a big role on where we source components."

Tuesday, 11 January 2011

German companies and high-ranking government officials, led by Mr. Jost de Jager, Economic Minister of Schleswig-Holstein state, will be playing a major part in World Future Energy Summit (WFES) 2011, with over 60 companies from Germany now confirmed to take part in the event taking place in Abu Dhabi from 17-20 January 2011. HE Jurgen Becker, State Secretary, Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, Germany, who recently participated in the UN Climate Change Conference (COP16) in Mexico, will also be speaking at a panel discussion on Day One of the summit.

The announcement comes just weeks after the German government affirmed its commitment to giving renewable energy a central role in future energy policy with the announcement of plans to raise the share of renewable energy sources in power generation from 16% today to 80% by 2050.

Leading German Financial Services Provider, Deutsche Bank Group is Principal Sponsor of WFES 2011. Other companies confirmed to take part include Siemens, the global technology provider, which is Platinum Sponsor, along with the automotive company Daimler, which is the official transport partner for the event.

H. E. Ambassador Klaus-Peter Brandes, German Ambassador to the UAE, commented on Germany's participation in this year's event: "Germany has participated from the outset in the World Future Energy Summits at Abu Dhabi and is proud to be represented once more in 2011 as one of the key players and as major exhibitor in this prestigious international fair. I have noted with great satisfaction that Germany was chosen as focus country in 2011. There is no doubt: Germany is an internationally recognized pioneer for climate protection and a trailblazer in mitigating global climate change."

In addition to Mr. Becker, there are currently ten speakers from Germany confirmed for the upcoming summit. Caio Koch-Weser, Vice Chairman, Deutsche Bank Group, UK, will be welcoming delegates to an afternoon of panel discussions on Day One in which Mr. Becker will be discussing 'Tackling the World's Future Energy Challenges' alongside other international energy ministers.

Other speakers at the summit will include Rene Umlauft, CEO Renewable Energy Siemens alongside Tilman Krauch, President Construction Chemicals, BASF SE, who will provide expert business insights into renewable energy. Thomas Braig, Head of EcoCommercial Building at Bayer Material Science will be speaking on building sustainable green cities, Herbert Kohler, Vice President E-drive and Future Mobility at Daimler will be taking part in a discussion about e-mobility, and Bernd Holling, Vice Director, Business Development at Lind Group will be participating in a session on carbon capture and storage.

Two exhibitions will run alongside the 2011 summit, featuring over 40 leading German energy companies as part of the German Pavilion, Organised by Germany's Federal Economic Ministry, putting it among the largest of any of the country pavilions.

Germany also had a strong presence at the recent UN Climate Change Conference (COP16) in Cancun, Mexico, from 29 November to 10 December 2010. In a speech given at the conference, Norbert Röttgen called for more support for climate protection by pointing out the potential benefits for economic growth. Speaking in Cancun, Mr. Röttgen called upon countries around the world to take concerted action by creating robust international rules , and it is expected that he will continue this sentiment at WFES in Abu Dhabi.

Held under the Patronage of His Highness General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed forces and hosted by Masdar, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mubadala Development Company focused on advancing the development, commercialisation and deployment of renewable energy and clean technology solutions, the World Future Energy Summit themed 'enabling future energy solutions' will run from 17-20 January 2011 and comprises the four day conference, alongside two exhibitions - a World Future Energy Exhibition and World Future Environment Exhibition.